This is not an official news source for CineForm or GoPro product releases, just some bits and pieces of stuff I happen to be working on. My work and hobbies are pretty much the same thing. -- David Newman

Monday, June 06, 2005

Do we port to the Mac or does Apple come over to our camp? Not that I'm going to reveal CineForm's plans for Apple support, but it is clear that CineForm has always had an interest in porting to the Mac, to offer compressed Digital Intermediate work-flows under Final Cut Pro. The announcement today doesn't change our interest, but it potentially makes our work much easier. Porting to Quicktime has never been a big concern, but maintaining two optimized CODEC engines, one for Intel's SSE2/3 and another for the PowerPC's Altivec, is a bigger pain. Compression speed is of such high importance to CineForm, so optimization is key. If only the changeover was sooner.

Of course purchasing a G5 Mac today for post-production has got to be a hard decision. Final Cut Pro loses some of its gloss if it doesn't keep up with CPU performance (until it switches to Intel in 2007?)